then wiped his mouth with his sleeve as hot tears gushed from his eyes. With a smile frozen on his face, he said, “Gao Yang, oh Gao Yang, you bastard, how could you be so lucky? Who else could have the good fortune to feast on a delicious onion roll and wash it down with fine wine?”
He finished off the bottle, then sprawled out on the brick floor and cried his eyes out.
Later that day Party Secretary Huang came to tell him that the police had to deal with containing the floodwaters of the Sandy River, and hadn’t time to waste looking for the body of his mother, anyway. So he was fined two hundred yuan and released.
The roads were already a sea of mud when he trudged home at dawn, and it was raining again; large drops pelting him on the head felt wonderful. “Mother,” he thought aloud, “I wasn’t a filial son while you were alive, but at least I managed to give you a decent burial. The poor and lower-middle-class peasants go to the crematorium when they die, but not you. That makes it all worth it.”
As he turned into his yard he witnessed the roof of the three-room hut he called home slowly caving in, sending pockets of water and mud splashing in all directions. Then the whole thing collapsed with a roar, and there in front of him, all of a sudden, was the acacia grove and the roiling yellow water of the river that flowed behind his house.
He cried out for his mother and fell to his knees in the mud.
2.
Dawn came. He had, apparently, gotten a little sleep, but now he was sore all over. Fire seemed to shoot from his nose and mouth, both of which nearly ignited spontaneously from the superheated air. He shivered so violently that the metal springs of the cot creaked. Why do people shiver? That’s what I want to know-why do people shiver? A covey of little red girls ran and jumped and screeched and yelled on the ceiling, so flimsy that swirling gusts of wind easily bent them this way and that. One of them-naked, holding a bamboo staff-stood off by herself. “Isn’t that Xinghua?” he asked out loud. “Xinghua, get down from there this minute! If you fall, you’ll kill yourself!”
“I can’t get down, Daddy.” She began to cry. Large crystalline tears hung suspended in midair on the tips of her hair instead of falling to the floor.
A strong gust of wind swept the children away, and a gray-haired old woman slogged unsteadily through the roadside muck, a tattered blanket thrown over her shoulders, one shoe missing. She was mud-spattered from head to toe.
“Mother!” he screamed. “I thought you were dead!”
As he ran toward her, he felt his body grow lighter, until he was as insubstantial as the cluster of little girls. Buffeted by gusty winds, his body was stretched to several times its original length, and he had to hold on to the rails around him to keep his balance as he stood before his mother. She rolled her muddy eyes and gaped at him.
“Mother!” he exclaimed excitedly. “Where have you been all these years? I thought you were dead.”
She shook her head lightly.
“Mother, eight years ago all the landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists had their labels removed, and land was parceled out to people who work the fields. I married a woman with a crippled arm and a good heart. She bore you a granddaughter and a grandson, so our line wont die out. We have a surplus of food, and if this year’s garlic crop hadn’t rotted before it could be sold, we’d even have some money saved up.”
Mother’s face underwent a metamorphosis, and a pair of wormy maggots slithered out of her muddy eye sockets. Once the initial shock had worn off, he reached over to pluck out the maggots; but when he touched her skin, a clammy chill streaked from the tip of his finger all the way to the core of his heart. At the same time a yellow fluid oozed from Mother’s body, and her flesh and sinews flew off in chunks in the wind, until only a bare skeleton stood before him. A fearful scream tore from his throat.
Shouts came from far away: “Hey, pal… say, pal… wake up! Are you possessed or something?”
Six blazing green eyes were fixed on him. A clawlike hand, covered with green fur, reached out, utterly terrifying him. The icy hand recoiled when it brushed his forehead, as if scalded.
The green claw-hand returned to cover his forehead, bringing terror and contentment at the same time.
“You’re sick, pal,” the middle-aged inmate said loudly. “You’re burning up with fever.” He covered Gao Yang with a blanket-almost tenderly-this same man who had forced him to drink his own piss. “I’d say it’s the flu, so you’ll have to sweat it out.”
His mind was in an upheaval, and he was shivering uncontrollably. Why do people shiver? he asked himself. Why do they have to do that? His cellmates came up and added the weight of their blankets to his. He was still shivering, setting the four blankets in sympathetic motion. One rode up until it covered his face and blocked out the light. The stench made him gasp. Sweat oozing from his pores had the lice squirming and leaping. He sensed the imminence of his own death, if not from the illness that gripped him, then from the stifling oppressiveness of piled- on blankets that felt like moth-eaten cowhides. Straining with all his might, he managed to lift the errant blanket from his face, and immediately felt like a man whose head has bobbed to the surface of a swamp. “Help me, you people-save me!” he screamed.
He struggled to grab an invisible handle that was the only thing keeping him from falling into a stupor-like a man grasping a drooping willow branch as he sinks into a quagmire. The space before his eyes was light one minute, dark the next. In the darkness, all the demons danced; his dead parents and the cluster of red children leaped and spun, giggling as they circled him, tickling him under the arms or tweaking his ears or nipping him on the buttocks. Father wandered a glass-strewn street, willow switch in hand, frequendy stumbling for no apparent reason-sometimes intentionally, it seemed, and sometimes as if an invisible behemoth had pushed him. But every time he fell, either by design or by accident, he rose with shards of glass inlaid in his face, which sparkled and shone.
When Gao Yang reached out to grab the spirits, the darkness vanished, leaving only the giggles of spirits to reverberate near the ceiling. The emerging sun lit up the sky, but not his cell, even though he could make out the shapes of objects in it. The towering middle-aged inmate pounded angrily on the creaky door with both fists, while the other cellmates-one old and one young-raised their voices like wolves baying at the moon.
Thudding footsteps in the corridor signaled the approach of the guards. A face appeared at the opening. “Is this a rebellion or something?”
“It’s no rebellion. Number Nine’s so sick I think he’s dying.”
“This cell’s more trouble than all the others combined! I’ll tell the watch officer when he comes on duty.”
“He’ll be dead before then.”
The guard shone his flashlight on Gao Yang, who squeezed his eyes shut to keep out the blinding light.
“His color looks pretty rosy to me.”
“Because he’s got a fever.”
“Why all the fuss over a common cold?” The guard walked off.
Gao Yang returned to an agonizing realm of alternating light and darkness, where Father and Mother led little demons up to torment him. He could feel their breath and smell their odor. But, as before, when he reached out, they vanished, taking the darkness with them and leaving behind only the anxious faces of his cellmates.
Breakfast was slid in through the slot at the bottom of the door. He overheard his cellmates talking in hushed voices.
“Try to eat something, buddy,” the middle-aged inmate said as he held him by the shoulders.
He didn’t even have the strength to shake his head.
Some time later he heard the door open and felt a rush of fresh air fill the cell, which helped clear his head. One blanket after another was peeled away like layers of skin.
“What’s wrong?” It was a gentle, feminine voice. A simple question, so earnest and so warm. Dimly he saw the once-kindly face of his mother. Opening his eyes to gaze through strata of mist, he discerned the shape of a large white face atop a long white gown. The gown had an antiseptic smell; the wearer, the clean, soapy smell of an aristocratic woman.
It
